The Royal Asiatic Society, London, hosted a book launch for Christopher Penn's The Nicholas Brothers & A. T. W. Penn: photographers of South India 1855–1885. 

The Nicholas Brothers & A. T. W. Penn: photographers of South India 1855–1885 is published by Quaritch. It is available at a special price of £40 until 1 December 2014. Contact: Alice Ford-Smith: a.ford-smith@quaritch.com Read more about the content here: http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/publication-the-nicholas-brothers-a-t-w-penn

This ground-breaking book by Kathryn Morgan examines the 1877-78 publication Street Life in London,by journalist Adolphe Smith and photographer John Thomson, which aimed to reveal, through the innovative use of photography and essays, the conditions of a life of poverty in London.

Now regarded as a pioneering photo-text and a foundational work of socially conscious photography – “one of the most significant and far-reaching photobooks in the medium’s history” (The Photobook: A History) – Street Life in London did not achieve commercial success in its own time. However, in Street Life in London we see the start, but not the conclusion, of a conversation between text and image in the service of education, reportage and social justice. This book is the first-ever in-depth analysis of the genesis, development and context of Smith and Thomson’s innovative publication. 

More information: http://bit.ly/museumsetc005

The author, Dr Emily Kathryn Morgan, is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at Iowa State University. 

Full details of this richly illustrated, 556-page, full-colour publication, sample pages and free worldwide shipping are available here: www.museumsetc.com/products/street-life-in-london-context-and-commentary

This 556-page full-colour book, with 75 illustrations, includes the following chapters:

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Revisiting and Re-examining Street Life In London
• John Thomson: Life and Writings
• Adolphe Smith: Life and Writings
• We Are Not The First On The Field
• Making Street Life in London
• True Types of the London Poor
• Street Life in London as Photo-Text
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

“As sustained and ambitious as the primary source itself… This engaging, astute account makes [Street Life in London] available to numerous other fields of study: urban history, sociology, media studies, and more.”

Britt Salvesen, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Museums Journal reports that the National Media Museum is consulting on a restructure that could see it make up to five posts redundant across its senior management team and film department.

The Bradford museum has been forced to scale back its five-year masterplan and reduce its operational costs due to ongoing government cuts. The museum’s parent organisation, the Science Museum Group, needs to find savings of £3.7m by 2015-16, in addition to a further £787,000 cut announced in last year’s autumn statement.

The National Media Museum launched a consultation into the proposed changes last Friday. A spokesman from the museum said: “We have started consultation with five members of staff affected by proposed changes to structures and roles within the National Media Museum senior management team and film department. 

“We recognise that this is an extremely difficult time and will ensure that this will be conducted with the utmost consideration for those staff members who are affected.”

Read the full story here: http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/29102014-nmm-consults-on-senior-level-redundancies

The former Picture Post photographer Thurston Hopkins has died aged 101 years. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2000.  Godfrey Thurston Hopkins trained as a magazine illustrator at Brighton College of Art, but discovering that the camera ‘paid better than the brush’ he began working as a Fleet Street press photographer from 1930.

However the cliché ridden imagery and ruthless tactics required by successful press photographers of the period didn’t satisfy his creative mind and, disillusioned, he returned to his home town to set up his own successful photographic business.

When war broke out Thurston joined the RAF Photographic Unit and in Italy he acquired a Leica ‘the first camera I can recall handling without a certain feeling of distaste’. After the War he freelanced for newspapers and magazines all over Europe, exploring the new visual world offered by the small format camera. Inspired during the war years by the ‘new breed’ of photographers such as Kurt Hutton, Felix Mann and Leonard McCombe, Thurston finally attained his ambition in 1949  – working exclusively forPicture Post, first in a freelance capacity before becoming a ‘staffer’ in 1951 until the magazine’s demise in 1957,

Travelling on assignments in Africa, India, Australia and the Pacific he received two British Press Pictures of the Year awards for his reportage work during this period. Thurston’s photographs are marked by his sensitive and creative approach, creating first class records of the human condition.

After following a successful career in advertising in the 1960s he taught and lectured in photography in a number of academic institutions before returning to his first love, painting. He lived on England’s south coast with his wife, Grace Robertson – another ex-Picture Post photographer.

The text above is taken from the Getty Images website: http://www.gettyimagesgallery.com/collections/archive/thurston-hopkins.aspx

See also: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/audioslideshow/2013/apr/19/picture-post-thurston-hopkins

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/apr/12/thurston-hopkins-picture-post-photography

The Society for Imaging Science and Technology has announced a call for papers for Archiving 2015. The conference is to be held the week of 18 May at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. Read more and download a PDF version of this Call for Papers at www.imaging.org/archiving.

About The Conference

The IS&T Archiving Conference brings together a unique community of imaging novices and experts from libraries, archives, records management, and information technology institutions to discuss and explore the expanding field of digital archiving and preservation. Attendees from around the world represent industry, academia, governments, and cultural heritage institutions. The conference presents the latest research results on archiving, provides a forum to explore new strategies and policies, and reports on successful projects that can serve as benchmarks in the field. Archiving 2015 is a blend of short courses, invited focal papers, keynote talks, and refereed oral and interactive display presentations.

Proposed Program Topics

Prospective authors are invited to submit abstracts describing original work for presentation at the 2015 conference in technical areas related to the general fields of:

• Digital Preservation
  Infrastructure, Repositories, Web Harvesting and Archiving
• Creating and Preserving Dynamic Media
  Sound, Film, Digital Art
• Imaging Technology
  Including digital documentation and forensic analysis of art
• Using Tools, Systems, and Services
  Quality Assurance, Managing file formats including image compression and Digital Forensics
• Managing Content and Digital Curation
  Policies, processes, metrics for services, illustrating value and ROI, and systems
  Access rights management
  Data privacy and PII (personally identifiable information)
• Share Economies and Partnerships
• Innovative Software, Projects, and Services

All submitted proposals will be peer reviewed by the program committee to assure that the program provides significant, timely, and authoritative information.

Submission Procedures

Prospective authors are invited to submit abstracts describing original work for presentation at the 2015 conference in any technical areas related to digital preservation, image capture and workflow, and digital curation.

All papers presented at Archiving 2015 will be published in the conference proceedings, indexed with various services, filed with the US Library of Congress, and made available as downloadable PDFs through the IS&T digital library. Authors may propose either a 20-minute oral or an interactive discussion presentation format. This enables presenters to engage with other delegates at the conference in the mode best suited to their content and desires. Oral and interactive papers are considered of equal importance and merit.

Papers presented at the conference should be authoritative and complete in regard to advancing the state of knowledge in the area of digital preservation and archiving. The conference language is English.

Abstract submissions must:

• use the template found on the submission page and feature a total length of 1-2 pages
• clearly identify the technical content of the paper, including information explaining how the material is new or distinct from previously presented/published work on the same topic
• include name of author and all co-authors, and supply a maximum 50-word bio for each
• provide complete contact info (address, phone, fax, e-mail) for the primary author, and indicate the format preference (oral or interactive).

A web-based form and instructions for submitting a proposal will be available athttp://www.imaging.org/ist/newpapers/2015arch/authors/. Use of this process is strongly encouraged, although submissions will be accepted via e-mail at papers@imaging.org. Please put your LAST NAME and ARCH15 SUBMISSION in the subject line.

Abstract Submission Deadline: December 8, 2014.

Notification of acceptance/rejection:February 16, 2015

Upon notice of acceptance, authors are sent detailed instructions for submitting the full text of the paper for publication in the conference proceedings, including forms for "transfer of copyright." Please note that each author is responsible for obtaining appropriate clearance as necessary.

Final Manuscript Deadline: March 31, 2015.

Tate Britain's Victorian and Edwardian Art Research Centre is holding a research seminar on 4 November based around the upcoming BP Spotlight Display ‘Poor Man’s Picture Gallery’: Art and Stereoscopic Photography.  Exploring how the reproduction of fine art imagery through the intimate hand-held form of stereoscopy has affected our understanding of both forms of art, the display raises questions about realism central to the nineteenth-century arts. This seminar will provide an opportunity to share research on the works in the display, and to consider the relationship between stereoscopes and fine art.

In 1846 William Henry Fox Talbot provided probably over 6000 original Talbotype images to the Art Union journal in a promotional effort which today is largely overlooked.  The images were provided to popularise his photographic method and the publication was the first journal in the world to include photographs.   Due largely to the haste of production, today, the images are often badly faded and this has contributed to the poor reputation of the feat.

The Project seeks to undertake a census of extant copies of the 1846 Art Union and Calotype images. Read more about it and download the census/information form here: http://www.1846artunion.org/

The Photographers' Archives and Legacy Project is planning to add more material to the project website - www.photolegacyproject.co.uk - and it would like to hear from photographers whose work has a social, archival interest. It is particularly interested in: 

a) Photographers who are involved in or are about to start a commissioned project or residency, or a commissioning agency. We would like to be able to follow one or more projects, to get a picture of the potential, dynamics, issues and problems that you encounter as you work on a commissioned project and perhaps consider a legacy for the work that is made. These may become case studies or short profiles for the website;

b) Photographers who have a story to tell about their photographic work and archive and what they are doing with it. The stories will feed into the blog, which is to become more active. 

Contact: 

Val Millington

Project Coordinator

Photographers' Archives Research Project

info@photolegacyproject.co.uk

www.photolegacyproject.co.uk

Papers are welcome from all career stages. The PHRC can offer three small bursaries of £100 to help Ph.D. students with travel and accommodation expenses. Please indicate when submitting your abstract if you would like to be considered.

Abstracts of no more than 200-­‐300 words should be sent to: phrc@dmu.ac.uk by December 1st 2014.

Call for Papers: PHOTOGRAPHY IN PRINT

22-­‐23 JUNE 2015

Photographic History Research Centre De Montfort University, Leicester, UK 

Leicester's De Montfort University's Photographic History Research Centre has reported that Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Director of the PHRC, has been honoured by The Society for Visual Anthropology. The Society has given Edwards its Lifetime Achievement Award for 2014. 

See: http://photographichistory.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/prof-elizabeth-edwards-2014-lifetime-achievement-award-winner-sva/

Oxford, 6 October 2014 – The Bodleian Libraries have secured the final funds needed to acquire the Personal Archive of William Henry Fox Talbot.  The final funds come via a legacy donation to the Libraries.   

The Bodleian’s appeal to acquire the Fox Talbot Archive was launched two years ago in late 2012 with an aim to raise the £2.25 million needed to purchase the Archive.  A significant grant of £1.2 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) in December 2012 gave the appeal a vital boost with further gifts from the Art Fund along with donations from numerous other private individuals and charitable trusts helping to increase the tally to £1.9 million. The recent legacy donation has allowed the Bodleian Libraries to now reach its target of £2.25 million.  

The campaign to raise funds has been widely supported by many well-known names across a variety of disciplines for which the Talbot archive has particular significance. These include: photographers Martin Parr and Hiroshi Sugimoto, artist David Hockney; Director-General of the Royal Photographic Society, Michael Pritchard; scientists Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society; Sir Michael Berry, FRS, Melville Wills Professor of Physics, (Emeritus), University of Bristol; and historians Colin Ford, CBE, Founding Head, National Media Museum and Prof Martin Kemp, FBA former Prof of Art History, University of Oxford. 

Announcing the news on Sunday 5 October at the Photography Oxford Festival 2014, Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian said:  ‘We are so pleased to have reached our fundraising target and are at last able to secure the Fox Talbot archive. We are extremely grateful for all the donations we received, from the grants awarded by the Art Fund and the NHMF to all the individual donations and for the unwavering support we’ve had in our campaign. We look forward to making this fascinating and important resource available to scholars, students and the photographic community.’ 

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was one of the greatest polymaths of the Victorian age, and is most famous today for being the British ‘founder of photography’. The Archive contains enormous potential for greater understanding of the breadth of Talbot’s scholarly activities, and of the influences exerted by the women in his family, in particular their educative roles, their shared interests in botany, languages, art, travel and history which are so central to Talbot’s work, and their roles as practitioners, supporters, and collectors of the new art.    

The Talbot Archive also includes artefacts such as glassware and artworks that Talbot photographed for the ground-breaking publication The Pencil of Nature, the first book illustrated with photographs. There is a strong connection to Oxford as the Archive includes some of the first pictures of the city.

Alongside items related to his pioneering work in photography, the Archive also sheds valuable light on his personal life, his role managing his estate at Lacock, his life as a Member of Parliament, and his range of intellectual interests from science to ancient languages. 

About the Personal Archive of William Henry Fox Talbot

The Fox Talbot archive includes:

• original manuscripts by Talbot
• family diaries
• family drawing and watercolour albums and sketchbooks, including images made  by Talbot’s mother, his wife,  and by his sister
• correspondence
• early photographic images made by Talbot
• an image made by Talbot’s wife, c. 1839, which may be the earliest image made by a woman
• several hundred photographs received by Talbot - by other photographers from Britain and across the continent, contemporaries of Fox Talbot who shared their images and attempts at early photography
• portraits of Talbot and his family
• materials and artefacts related to the Lacock estate including estate plans, bills etc
• books from Talbot’s personal library
• musical scores from Talbot and his immediate family
• scientific instruments from Talbot’s own collection
• botanical specimen albums made by Talbot and members of his immediate family.

Having now acquired the Archive the Bodleian Libraries plan to run a series of public events to support access to the Archive, including a major exhibition in 2017. Highlights from the Archive will also feature in the opening exhibition for the Weston Library and in a number of smaller displays.

The Talbot Archive will also provide rich material for a related project based at the Bodleian Libraries, the development of a Catalogue Raisonné of Fox Talbot’s photographic work.  The Bodleian recently appointed Professor Larry J Schaaf as Project Director for the Catalogue. The goal is to make more than four decades of Schaaf’s research available to a wider public audience through an online resource, and to invite scholars from a range of fields to add to the catalogue by contributing their knowledge and research related to Talbot’s life and work. 

Schaaf is also the founder and Editor of the Online Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot which includes fully annotated transcriptions of more than 10,000 of Talbot’s letters at www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk.

At a public meeting held at Oxford’s Bodleian Library today, Head Librarian Richard Ovenden (right) made the first announcement of three initiatives that will support William Henry Fox Talbot studies in the United Kingdom and internationally. At the same time they will make the Bodleian central to Talbot studies and the lead of the world’s three principal Talbot archives held at the National Media Museum, Bradford, the British Library, London, and the Bodleian, Oxford.

Ovenden was able to announce, firstly, the completion of the acquisition of the Talbot family archive for the Bodleian which completes the £2.2 million purchase, saving the archive for the nation. (Click here for the previous BPH report on the archive appeal).  

Secondly, he introduced Dr Mirjam Brusius (left) as an Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Bodleian. Brusius will lead a renewed focus on the history of photography in Oxford, centred on the Bodleian and will lead work on cataloguing, digitising and interpreting the Talbot archive.

Thirdly, he announced that Professor Larry Schaaf’s long mooted project of preparing a catalogue raisonné of Talbot’s photography had secured funding and would be housed at the University of Oxford and Bodleian Library. He described this as a ‘major scholarly venture’. Schaaf, who is the world’s foremost Talbot scholar, had long had hopes of preparing such a catalogue.

The catalogue raisonné, along with the recent cataloguing of the British Library, Bodleian and National Media Museum Talbot holdings, and the availability of Talbot’s online letters, has the potential to radically inform and revise Talbot’s role in the development of negative/positive photography and will help support a new chronology of his work.

Schaaf, speaking to the audience, (right) said the catalogue raisonné would allow researchers to ‘associate things we’ve never seen before…[and] reveal variations  never studied before’. Schaaf, who has been researching Talbot for more than forty years, has produced a series of landmark books, catalogues essays and papers on Talbot, his circle and his photography. He is project director for the Talbot letters project at now hosted by De Montfort University. He paid tribute to past Talbot historians including Harold White who’s work had prepared the ground for his own and to Matilda Talbot, who did much to ensure his legacy was preserved.

Schaaf currently has some 25,000 Talbot negatives and positives recorded in a DOS-based database and one of the new project’s tasks will be to migrate this data to a new platform that can also support images.

He concluded his presentation by saying, partly tongue-in-cheek, that ‘Digital photography is Talbot’s invention’.

More information will be made available by the Bodleian Library shortly. 

Oxford today saw William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography launched at a reception at the Bodleian Library. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) was a British pioneer in photography, yet he also embraced the wider preoccupations of the Victorian Age—a time that saw many political, social, intellectual, technical, and industrial changes. His manuscripts, now in the archive of the British Library, reveal the connections and contrasts between his photographic innovations and his investigations into optics, mathematics, botany, archaeology, and classical studies.

Drawing on Talbot’s fascinating letters, diaries, research notebooks, botanical specimens, and photographic prints, distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines, including historians of science, art, and photography, broaden our understanding of Talbot as a Victorian intellectual and a man of science.

Edited by Mirjam Brusius (shown right), Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam; With essays by Katrina Dean, Eleanor Robson, Mirjam Brusius, Graham Smith, Larry J. Schaaf, Simon Schaffer, Herta Wolf, Vered Maimon, Anne Secord, Chitra Ramalingam, and June Barrow-Green.

See: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300179347

Mirjam Brusius is postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Harvard University.Katrina Dean is a university archivist at Melbourne University. Chitra Ramalingam is postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

The Canal & River Trust has published online over 37,000 archive records and over 22,000 historic images from its archives for the first time ever.  The £50,000 project is the first phase of a major project to open up public access to the national waterways collection.

The Waterways Archive is housed at the National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port and is the largest archive of waterway-related materials in the country.  This important collection, which holds a wide range of primary material relating to the history of Britain’s canals and inland waterways, will be available for the public to access online from canalrivertrust.org.uk/archive 

Margaret Harrison, collections manager, Canal & River Trust said: “We’re so excited to be able give the public online access to these images for the first time.  The website includes over 20,000 archive images many of which help show the often hidden social history of the canals; the navigators who built them; the boating families that traded on them; and more recently the volunteers who campaigned to save them. These images sit alongside engineering plans, toll tickets, songs and maps amongst others.”

The archive images will be available for the public to purchase later in the year and the Trust is already putting in place plans to digitise a further 15,000 images.

Wendy Capelle, head of museums and attractions, Canal & River Trust said: “The Canal & River Trust cares for an extraordinary treasure-trove of historic images, documents and artefacts that trace the story of the nation’s inland waterways as far back as the 17^th century.  This project starts to throw some light on our wonderful collection and make it more accessible for students, historians and enthusiasts.”

The Canal & River Trust is working with specialist teams at UK Archiving and SSL Limited to complete this digitisation project.

Image: Mr Charles Burdett gauging a coal boat at Hawkesbury Junction, 1950s

The J. Paul Getty Museum announced today the acquisition of 49 photographs by documentary photographer Chris Killip (British, born 1946). Combined with one photograph already in the collection, the Museum now owns the complete set of 50 images found in Killip’s landmark book In Flagrante (Secker & Warburg, 1988). This gives the Getty the most significant group of vintage Killip prints in an American institution. The acquisition was made possible through the collective assistance of the Getty Museum Photographs Council, along with individual contributions from several members that allowed the Museum to purchase the complete body of Killip’s work.

Made between 1973 and 1985, Killip’s photographs document the social landscape of Northern England during the economic downturn that plagued the region. The images primarily feature working-class people and areas affected by the deindustrialization of Britain, and subjects range from derelict landscapes and council estates to parades and benefit concerts organized around the miners’ strikes of 1984. The scenes evoke the social tensions and economic upheaval of the period in British history known as the Thatcher era, named after Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979-1990. The photographs were compiled and reproduced in In Flagrante, considered by the artist to be a distinct and highly personal project.

“Chris Killip’s work offers an intimate and highly personal portrayal of the social impact of England’s industrial decline in the politically fraught years of Thatcher’s fight against the unions,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This acquisition greatly expands our holdings of Killip’s most important work, as well as strengthening the Department’s collection of postwar documentary photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. Our holdings of Killip will now have an important place beside those of Bill Brandt, Josef Koudelka, Martin Parr, and Graham Smith.”

Killip is considered one of the most influential documentary photographers of the postwar generation. Born and raised on the Isle of Man, he has made a career of documenting the people of Great Britain and the environments in which they live. As a result of his intensive approach, which frequently involves his immersion in the communities he photographs, Killip often forms strong relationships with his subjects and achieves an unparalleled intimacy in his work.

Killip’s work has been exhibited internationally, and in 2012 the Museum Folkwang in Essen organized a retrospective which traveled to Le Bal in Paris and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Publications released during the last fifteen years include Pirelli Work (2006), Here Comes Everybody (2009), Seacoal (2011), and arbeit/work (2012).

On Sunday, October 19, Chris Killip will speak about his work at the Getty Center at 4:30 p.m. in the Museum Lecture Hall.

Plans for the exhibition of the photographs will be announced at a later date.

Image: Bever, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire (1980). Chris Killip (British, born 1946). Gelatin Silver print, 27.9 x 34.4 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council. © Chris Killip

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923 - 1937 has its UK premiere at The Photographers’ Gallery this Autumn, presenting over 200 vintage prints, many on public display for the first time since the 1930s.  

Brought  together  especially  for  this  presentation, they  mark  the  period  when Steichen was working for Condé Nast on their two most prestigious publications: Vogue  and Vanity  Fair.    The  exhibition  offers  a  rare  opportunity,  not  just  to witness a key period in history but also to gain insight into Steichen’s distinctive approach  towards  portraiture  and  fashion  photography.  First  and  foremost  an independent art photographer, he was a major pioneer in the development of the medium and its status as an art form.  

Steichen was already an internationally celebrated painter and photographer when in 1923 he was offered the lucrative and high-profile position as chief photographer at Condé Nast.  During his period of employment there, Steichen was said to have been  the  best  known  and  highest  paid  photographer  in  the  world.  For  the  next fifteen  years,  Steichen  would  take  full  advantage  of  the  resources  and  prestige conferred  by  his  role  to  produce  an  oeuvre  of  unequalled  brilliance.    His  work defined  the  culture  of  his  time,  capturing  iconic  figures  in  politics,  literature, journalism, dance, theatre and, above all, the world of haute-couture.

Universally  regarded  as  the  first  ‘modern’  fashion photographer,  he  was  in  fact originally  appointed  to  take  portraits  of  the  great  and  the  good  that  graced  the pages of Vanity Fair.  Seeing the effect these images had on the readership, he was persuaded to turn his attention towards the fashion pages in Vogue.  

The  works  in  the  exhibition  convey  Steichen’s  forward  thinking  and  ‘painterly’ techniques.  He  borrowed  from  a  range  of  aesthetic  movements  including Impressionism,  Art  Nouveau  and  Symbolism  to  create a  characteristic  Art  Deco style.  Within  his  meticulous  compositions,  he  treated  his  subjects  as  vehicles through which to explore shape, form, texture, light and shade. 

In High Fashion presents  photographs that depict designs from  Chanel,  Lanvin, Lelong, Patou, Schiaparelli amongst many others, alongside a series of portraits.  These  include  luminaries  such  as  Greta  Garbo,  Cecil  B.  De  Mille,  Winston Churchill,  Marlene  Dietrich,  Josef  von  Sternberg,  Frank  Lloyd  Wright,  Amelia Earhart, the writers W.B. Yeats and Colette; the dancers Martha Graham and Fred Astaire   and   the   musicians   Vladimir   Horowitz   and   George   Gershwin.  

Providing  an  Art  Deco  backdrop  for  the  images  is  a series  of  three  unique wallpapers  that  Steichen  designed  for  Stehli  Silks Corporation  as  part  of  their Americana  Prints  collection  (1925 - 27).  This  collection  featured  specially commissioned patterns from noted artists and celebrities of the time. Steichen used abstract arrangements of matches, eyeglasses, jellybeans, rice, buttons and threads to create his designs.  Also on display will be a selection of rare copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair presenting Steichen’s photographs in their original context. 

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923 - 1937 is curated by William A. Ewing, Todd Brandow and Nathalie Herschdorfer and produced by The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery. This exhibition has previously been shown in North America, Australia, Asia and Europe. 

Visitor Information:

31 October 2014-18 January 2015

Opening times: Monday - Saturday, 10:00 - 18:00, Thursdays, 10:00 - 20:00,
Sunday 11:30 - 18:00
Exhibitions admission: £4.50 / £3.50 concessions, free entry Mondays – Fridays
10:00 - 12:00, free entry to under 16s
Address: 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW
Nearest London Underground Station: Oxford Circus
T: + 44 (0)20 7087 9300
E: info@tpg.org.uk
W: thephotographersgallery.org.uk

Image:

Edward Steichen
Actress Mary Heberden, 1935 (Vogue, March 15, 1935) Courtesy of Condé Nast Archive, Condé Nast
Publications, Inc, New York/ Paul Hawryluk, Dawn
Lucas and Rachael Smalley

A one-day postgraduate symposium is being held on 25 November 2014 in the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester. Photographic Histories of Psychology seeks to explore how photography and psychology have influenced each other throughout their histories. Its aim is twofold: to uncover how psychological notions have informed photographic practices, and to bring into light the historical role that photography has played in the making of psychological knowledge and its public dissemination.

The emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline and the popularization of photography occurred in parallel in the last third of the nineteenth century. Since then, photographs have been used in psychological experiments, and psychological theories of perception have been applied to understand the reception of photography. Whereas much research has been done on these topics, only sparse scholarly literature has attended to other aspects such as the role that photographic images played in the configuration of psychological and psychiatric thinking in the nineteenth century, and the ways in which psychological findings have penetrated into popular culture by means of photography.

Photographic Histories of Psychology will contribute to this scholarship by reflecting on how photographic materials have circulated through scientific and non-scientific contexts. It proposes to analyse the ways in which professional and amateur photography have historically appropriated, negotiated, rejected and disseminated psychological ideas. Rather than focusing on the notion of photographic representation or its meaning, we invite contributors to examine how, for example, psychological definitions of memory have affected the notion of the archive and the family album; how psychological theories on emotions have incited different gestures and expressions in front of the camera; or what role the illustrated press has played in the dissemination or depathologization of psychological disorders. Conversely, the event also seeks to examine how practices such as photographing, collecting photographs, or posing for the camera have penetrated into psychological discourses. How, for instance, particular uses of photography have inspired psychological research into historically specific patterns of behaviour.

Registration now open
registration fee include sandwich lunch, tea and coffee

There are various products available, please make sure to register using the correct category:

* £0: This category is only for PHRC students and symposium speakers
* £10: This category is for De Montfort University students only
* £20: This category is for students of any other institution
* £26: This category is for non-students

Read more and register here: http://photographichistory.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/photographic-histories-of-psychology-one-day-postgraduate-symposium/

A call for papers has been made for a workshop organised byProfessor Elizabeth Edwards and Dr Ewa Manikowska and titled: Survey Photography and Cultural Heritage in Europe (1851-1945):  Expanding the Field. The large-scale application of photography to the recording and preservation of cultural heritage is a transnational movement that appeared at a very particular cultural moment. This focuses on the phenomenon of survey photography in the same historical period,  from Britain in the age of High Empire across Europe to the multi-ethnic territories of the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. While there are striking links between the survey images produced in such distinct cultural and political contexts, there are also similarities and differences in the patterns underlying their production, use, dissemination, impact and the networks of survey actors.  This workshop emerges from the conviction of a need to establish a new research agenda at the intersection of the cultural history, history of photography,  and the concept of national heritage. Thus, the core aims of the workshop are to explore the practices and politics of photographic survey and to indicate and delineate the topics, chronology and methodology of survey photography seen as a European phenomenon (both in its transnational and local aspects) closely linked to the Western concepts of culture, identity and memory.

We invite papers both general and based on specific case-studies from the period between 1851 and 1945, which consider survey and record photography in its wider European context and which contribute to an understanding of its wider definition, analysis and understanding. The workshop will discuss survey photography:

-          as a response to specific historical moments;

-          as a local and transnational phenomenon;

-          as a codification of national heritages;

-          as a scientific and an amateur practice;

-          as a geographical practice;

-          as a response to imperial expansion/consolidation;

-          as definition of group identities through the visualisation of cultural heritage;

-          through its institutions and actors;

-          through its specific photographic practices;

-          through the photographic survey archive;

The workshop will take the form of pre-circulated papers (all papers to be submitted by the end of February 2015). Participants will be asked to use their papers as the basis of a 20 or 30 minute presentation (depending on final schedule) addressing the issues of the workshop.

The number of speakers is limited to 20. Applicants will be notified of the chosen proposals by 30 November 2014. The workshop will take place on 14–15 April 2015 in the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Accommodation costs can be covered when necessary.

Survey Photography and Cultural Heritage in Europe (1851-1945):  Expanding the Field

(A workshop organized by Prof. Elizabeth Edwards and Dr. Ewa Manikowska

Warsaw, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, 14–15 April 2015)

Abstract of no more than 300 words should be sent by 15 October 2014 to:

Dr Manikowska (emanikowska@hotmail.com) & Professor Edwards (eedwards@dmu.ac.uk)

De Montfort University's Photographic History Research Centre has published its Autumn research seminar programme. All are welcome and there is no need to book, just turn up. Enquriies can be directed to the convener: Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Photographic History Research Centre (eedwards@dmu.ac.uk). For abstracts check PHRC website or PHRC blog http://photographichistory.wordpress.com

Autumn 2014

Tuesdays 4 – 6pm   Hugh Aston Building  [check rooms for each seminar]

October 14  (HU 2.31)

Caroline Edge (University of Bolton)

Creating a collaborative Worktown Archive: Mass Observation and mass photography

In 1937 Mass Observation announced their intention to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ which would document everyday life in Britain. Photographer Humphrey Spender was recruited to participate in the organisation’s experimental study of Bolton. This lecture examines how his photographs, now held in the Worktown Archive at Bolton Museum, have been documented and reactivated using photographic methods in collaboration with the local community. 

November  11 (HU 2.08)

Dr Louise Purbrick (University of Brighton)

Collodion prints and corrugated iron: photography, materiality and the nitrate trade

On the surface of slag heap in an abandoned nitrate works lies a broken panel of corrugated iron. The nitrate works, Oficina Alianza, is one of many industrial ruins of the Atacama desert of northern Chile, sites once exploited by European speculators who dominated the extraction and export of nitrate, a highly valued ingredient of fertilizers and explosives.  At the height of the trade in late nineteenth century, a photographic album, Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899, was sent as a ‘souvenir’ to the senior partner of British merchant house Antony Gibbs and Company at his City of London offices by representative of his firm in Chile. It contained around a hundred collodion prints that traces the mining of nitrate, its movement across the desert to Pacific ports and European markets. The album, a material form in its own right, also documents the materials from which nitrate works were constructed: corrugated iron, an industrial colonial architecture that remains characteristic of industrial ruins of northern Chile. These entangled material presences of nitrate trade are examined in this paper as documents of the chemical, industrial and capitalist transformations of a remote desert landscape.

December 9 (HU 2.31)

Professor Maiken Umback and Professor Mathew Humphrey  (University of Nottingham)
Picturing Nature: Photographs (and Non-photographs) Between Political Mobilisation and Ideological Decontestation

Pictorial representations of nature abound, but how, when, and why are images of the natural world used for ideological purposes? In this paper we examine two, apparently conflicting, ideological strategies involving representations of nature – stabilisation and mobilisation. Ideological discourse can utilise nature for the purposes of naturalisation: they link politics with a particular conception of the natural order that reinforces existing belief structures and renders them ‘invisible’. Nature can also be used to mobilise support against existing political arrangements, to disrupt and challenge hegemonic power structures, to critique industrial society, even civilisation itself. As we shall argue, the two can also become paradoxically intertwined.Images play a crucial yet complicated role in such processes. Thus, when and for what purposes those who mobilise nature politically think photography a helpful vehicle, when they consciously abstain from using photographs, and when they reach for alternative genres of visual representations, are questions we explore (though shall not be able to answer definitively) in this paper.

The Irish Office of Public Works has published a book on the photographer William Despard Hemphill (1816–1902), a native of Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. The book accompanies an exhibition about Hemphill that is currently touring venues around Ireland. 

A well-respected medical practitioner with a wide range of interests, Dr Hemphill experimented with the latest photographic techniques and won several prestigious awards. At a time when photography was a complex, expensive and sometimes dangerous pursuit, Hemphill was among the first to photograph in detail antiquities such as the Rock of Cashel and Holycross Abbey. He was welcome too in some of the ‘big houses’ around Clonmel where there was considerable interest in amateur photography.

Hemphill’s images – portraits, still life, architecture and scenery – are records of immense historical value. They are also sublime works of art, inviting us to reflect on temporal beauty, artistic rendering and photography as interpretation. A fascinating aspect of Hemphill’s work was his stereoscopic photography.

The illustrated 104 page publication: William Despard Hemphill, Irish Victorian Photographer (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2014). ISBN 9781406428254) is edited by Dr Karol Mullaney-Dignam, and includes contributions from David H Davison, Richard Comerford and Eric Earle.